Depends on what you're trying to do. Last I heard Andreessen Horowitz was extremely bullish on it, 21.co recently came out of stealth (funded byAndreessen Horowitz and one of its founder Balaji Srinivasan is part ofAndreessen Horowitz) and there was an article just yesterday on Economist about the block chains.

The problem is, it doesn't serve any utility. New technologies need to be
born out of a need. It doesn't make sense to just create an alternative
currency when it doesn't improve the legacy. And displacing 'money' isn't
going to be something people just experiment with, like trying a new social
network. Bitcoin never stood a chance.

Legacy currencies aren't infallible and can leave a lot to be desired. Many, if not most countries have suffered through currency crises, high inflation, devaluation or capital controls. Bitcoin and digital currencies could potentially be an improvement over existing currencies in these situations. In addition, it it were possible to do business with anyone around the world using a common currency, that would seem to be an ease of use and efficiency improvement over the status quo.

Of course, for these things to happen, a digital currency would need to grow large enough to become stable. That's a pretty significant chicken and egg problem. The Bitcoin market cap has grown to about $4B, so there are certainly plenty of people experimenting with it, including some prominent startups and VCs. It may take a while to achieve critical mass, but I think it does stand a chance of happening.

Actually Bitcoin serves a lot of utility. Right now it's a huge money laundry in China for party officials and rich people to get their funds out of the country. There are of course other use cases, but at the moment, that's the big one.

Bitcoin and blockchains have a number of serious issues. Seems to me the next real currency will simply be Joules and or shares that any entity can offer in a decentralized way. A nice thing about bitcoin was that the float was not owned by banksters.

Funny you should bring this up now when there is, only very recently, so much going on in Bitcoin. China relaxes capital controls on it a little. Russia clamps down on Bitcoin. Gemini is launched by the Winklevoss twins and starts stirring interest. Then most major economic publications come out with with their "it's the blockchain and it's going to be big" articles all at the same time. And while "blockchain" trends as a google search term it is still dwarfed by "bitcoin." Meanwhile bitcoin price hops up 35% over the past couple of weeks.
The way I see it Bitcoin is somewhat of a pariah. It represents and reminds people of what they were too ignorant or lazy to see about crypto-currencies and what they still choose to deny about the token that fuels the concept of a distributed database and makes it work (and the massive amounts of resources that keep it secure). On the other side of it, Bitcoin has been teeming with snake-oil bottom of the barrel ideas and saying Bitcoin to an investor is like saying "I really don't know what I am doing but I think I can scam people."
I think we are witnessing a very natural ebb and flow at a rapid pace. Bitcoin is going through an accelerated maturity process. Suckers are getting cleared out and people are licking their wounds. As big a fan as I am, Bitcoin is not a panacea and, in fact, sucks at a lot of what people thought would great for. Most bets in Bitcoin have not paid out.
But Bitcoin is not gone and it definitely is not forgotten. There are precious few people who fundamentally understand it well enough to differentiate between ideas we can do and ideas we should do. That number is growing.
If you want to look at ideas that will probably shape the future of the markets I would point to OpenBazaar and OpenTransactions. The first is going to be a regulatory nightmare and will change small business globally. The second focuses on the concept of federated voting pools used to trustlessly settle accounts using bitcoin as a store of value (or hard commodity).

Bit coin started off as a good idea,then as usual the billionaire Industrialists began to manipulate it. Someone sunk a $100.000.000 into it, another $50m and thats the way to inflate the prices,so wait for it...others invested and pushed the value up beyond $700,then once the value peaked,most of the multi-millionaire purchasers sold everything,the result was it all fell. This practice called skimming,is how they play the Municipal Markets,and Bitcoin never recovered from that big skimming event,as the big investors went back to play the markets again.

Why do I need to sign in?

Popular Topics

Just a few more details please.

DO: Start a discussion, share a resource, or ask a question related to entrepreneurship.DON'T: Post about prohibited topics such as recruiting, cofounder wanted, check out my productor feedback on the FD site (you can send this to us directly info@founderdating.com).
See the Community Code of Conduct for more details.

Title

Give your question or discussion topic a great title, make it catchy and succinct.

Details

Make sure what you're about to say is specific and relevant - you'll get better responses.